hal

First of all, I've been a HawkHost customer for a number of years and have always been delighted with the service. I would unreservedly recommend it to others. That said, the issue I'm raising here is fundamental in the usefulness of the service. I believe it's vitally important, and affects everyone, so I hope you will take it in the constructive tone that it is intended. Would it please be possible for you to increase the SSL key length of your shared servers? It has been generally accepted for a number of years that a length of 1024 does not provide adequate security, and recent revelations about the NSA have confirmed this. Thus, a key length of 2048 is now recommended. Currently, I believe HawkHost is using keys of only 256 bits, which is extremely weak. This gives a very false sense of security to HawkHost's customers and, consequently, their website visitors. It also risks email accounts, passwords and other potentially-confidental data falling into criminal or nefarious hands. Please see this article for reference. Thank you in advance for considering this request. Hal

twinkie, it seems to me that you are simply spamming this forum. Hence, I vote that your account be disabled.

Tony I can see now why an opcode cache is not suitable for this kind of environment. Thank you for a very informed and informative explanation. Hal

Tony A PHP accelerator/opcode cache is a prerequisite to running symfony, my chosen framework. Symfony is used to run a number of high-traffic sites, each coping with millions of users. For example, http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/category/Case+studies I have not heard of an incompatibility or problem with applications or plugins running on symfony, not least because symfony encourages good coding practices and APC is extensively tested in production environments. eAccelerator is a good alternative, providing equivlent performance benefits to APC, and being equally well-tested and mature. If certain scripts experience difficulties running with these caching engines then that could well be caused by bad coding in the script. For instance, it is often the case that autoloaders that people write load classes in a different order when using an accelerator compared with not using one. The Symfony autoloader, and I guess the Zend one too, does not experience any such problem, because it was written with a good knowledge of the underlying architecture. While frameworks are great for standardising common coding tasks which would otherwise be difficult for an individual developer to get right, and also encouraging best practices and efficient code design, their weakness is their large codebase, which take time to execute on each request. The same can be said for other software, like CMSes such as Joomla for example which I have been running recently and noticed that the administrator interface runs painfully slow on the Hawkhost server I am using. Using an opcode cache typically increase the performance considerably of these apps because the code is already precompiled and ready to run. Hal

OK, Brian, that is understandable. However, there are other php accelerators available. Would you consider using one of those? Particularly, anecdotal opinion across the web suggests that eAccelerator works well with Zend Optimizer: http://2bits.com/articles/benchmarking-drupal-with-php-op-code-caches-apc-eaccelerator-and-xcache-compared.html http://2bits.com/articles/benchmarking-drupal-with-php-op-code-caches-apc-eaccelerator-and-xcache-compared.html http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/php-performance-with-eaccelerator-versus-eaccelerator-with-php-zend-optimizer/ http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-595594.html http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/574#comment_2 To be clear, the Zend Optimizer that is currently installed allows scripts encoded by Zend Guard Loader to be run, doesn't it? Why is this important? I have read that although Optimizer does indeed optimize code, the method it uses provides negligible benefit in some situations. http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-595594.html "ZO does some reasonable optimisations and will generally speed up execution. However, and here's the rub, when you add in the time taken to optimise code, whether there is an overall net gain in performance is far from certain, and it's not uncommon to get a slow down when ZO is installed. Last time we looked, this wasn't helped from time being spent optimising code that might not even be executed because ZO didn't perform lazy optimisation." Thanks Hal

Hi there, Hawkhost! I have noticed that APC is not installed on the venus server. Is this intentional? Running my PHP Framework on a PHP accelerator, preferably APC, is highly recommended by the developers. APC does seem to be compatible, and I imagine it would reduce the resources being consumed overall on the server. http://www.litespeedtech.com/how-tos.html#qa_phpacc Would you consider installing it? Thank you in advance Hal

OK, now that I have a better idea about what is going on, I feel it is satisfactory. Thanks for your answers, Tony. Hal

I have been reporting to Spamcop for many years, and without people like me to classify spam, it cannot work effectively. I also use spamhaus as an aid to this. Although these services are accurate, they are not faultless. I've seen some very large mail servers be blacklisted, affecting tens of thousands, or more, of users. It can take a lot of time for the administrator of the mail server to recover its reputation and get it removed from the blacklist and, in that time, the sender will not be able to contact the sendee, which seems to me is not an ideal situation. I suppose it would be more accurate, depending on how it is implemented. Does your system use a logical AND or OR as the basis for its decision? Hal

Tony None of those are configured for these accounts using cpanel. Are you saying that these are configured by default and cannot be disabled? I am concerned about false positives. What happens to these non-spam, rejected emails? Thanks Hal

I have recently moved from another host to Hawkhost's venus server. A pleasing, but curious, difference that I have noticed between the two is that while I received about 50 spam emails per day at my previous host, now I receive only one or two. Thus, can you think of any reason why this may be the case? Is Hawkhost using any mail/spam filtering software? Many thanks Hal

Tony As far as I have always heard in the Postgres community, everyone regards version 8.3 as very stable and unproblematic. I must admit that I have only run the 32bit version myself, but someone I know has 15 clusters running on 64bit machines with issue. I would be grateful if you could explain the main issue and symptom, so that I may find out whether the postgres devs are aware of it? Having said that, it is depressing to discover that even Centos 5.3 is still on Postgres 8.1, despite the latest version being 8.4. This certainly doesn't make a hosting company's job, like yours, any easier! I believe that you can use the -o option when running pg_dumpall, which preserves OIDs (such as when using them as foreign keys). I can appreciate your point, but one solution for new servers could be to run 8.1 on its standard port, and install an instance of 8.3 (or 8.4) concurrently on a different port. This would allow users to migrate in their own time, and at their own discretion. Although this would mean running two processes, the users using 8.3 would use the server's resources much more efficiently, which would help to offset any drawbacks. Hal

This is disappointing, as PostgreSQL 8.3 has many improvements over 8.1, not least performance. Sorry, but I do not understand what you mean by this. Would you explain? Thanks Hal

Thank you for your last post, Tony. So that there is no ambiguity, would you confirm that the phpinfo output in your previous attachment was produced by a live server *running cPanel*? If so, you have achieved what my current host could not achieve in 8 long months! cPanel staff have also said that the installation of PHP PDO*pgsql support is not straightforward (see http://forums.cpanel.net/f4/error-create-postgres-databases-114029.html#post512157. I am sure you can appreciate why I am a little surprised by how easy you have found it. Cody has assured me that Hawkhost always runs the latest version of PostgreSQL, and even 3 months ago, when I spoke to him last, you had already moved to PostgreSQL 8.3. Despite this, your attachment shows that the installed version is only 8.1. Could you explain this? I would feel more comfortable seeing the phpinfo output directly. Once you have addressed the above points, would you please give me access to it temporarily? Thank you again Hal

Tony As does my current host, but they have not been able to install and enable pdo+pgsql support. If you are able to show me that Hawkhost can provide this, by proving it in a phpinfo() output, then you will have my custom. I hope you can appreciate how crucial this issue is to me. Thank you Hal

Tony OK, I appreciate your point of view regarding phpinfo being different on each server (although I believe there would be value in making the PHP config consistent across all servers, from a management and support perspective), but it really is important for me to have the assurance of seeing that you have already successfully installed it, even if it's on a different server. Please would you send me a link to phpinfo() hosted on *any* server with PDO+pgsql enabled? Thank you Hal

Hawkhost, I am intending to transfer my WHM/cPanel reseller account to a new host before the end of July, and am seriously considering Hawkhost's "Advanced Reseller" package as one of the options. I have been speaking with Cody via Live Chat, and he has answered most of my questions, but there is one issue that I am still not completely satisfied with. Although Cody assured me that if I transferred to HH (I would prefer the Washington DC, as I am based in the UK), PHP support for PDO+pgsql could be enabled on request. This is such a deal-breaker for me, and I have had such problems with my current host, that I really would like to see this with my own eyes. Would it be possible for you to send me a link to a live phpinfo() output on one of your Washington servers, showing that PHP PDO Support for PostgreSQL has been enabled? If you would prefer to send it privately, then this would, of course, be acceptable. Thank you in advance Hal

Thank you for the lightening-fast response, Tony.

Would you mind telling me whether RvSkin and myPgAdmin are provided with your reseller service? Neither are listed on your products page. Many thanks Hal